Stalin's Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War Two on the Eastern Front

Stalin's Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War Two on the Eastern Front | Constantine Pleshakov | A good but not flawless account of those first ten days

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Stalin's Folly: Th...

	Stalin's Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War Two on the Eastern Front Constantine Pleshakov Houghton Mifflin, 2005 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched a massive three-pronged attack on the Soviet Union, and in days his troops were within reach of Moscow. The attack was stunning, but Stalin's response was even more astonishing. During the invasion, the mighty Soviet military stood in place while its soldiers were slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands.

Drawing on a wealth of newly available documents, from classified Politburo papers and diaries of key generals to diplomatic cables and secret police memos, the Russian historian Constantine Pleshakov paints a startling portrait of Stalin, one of history's most feared despots, as a vulnerable and paralyzed leader. Refusing to believe that the Germans would strike first, despite repeated warnings, he continued to supply them with war materials in the days before the attack, then tied his generals' hands in the crucial first hours of the invasion. For more than a week, while Hitler rolled over Soviet territory, Stalin cowered in his dacha, leaving the country rudderless and ? as Pleshakov reveals here ? nearly losing power. The Red Army's effort to regain the territory lost in those first ten days cost more than 10 million Soviet lives.

Stalin's Folly is a dramatic hour-by-hour account that sheds light
on an enigmatic and ruthless figure while providing a new and far
deeper understanding of Russian history.

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You will surely love it

If your looking at this book you probably already have an interest in WWII, Russia, Stalin, or the Eastern Front. If you can answer yes to any of these things, you will love this book. Of course, it is written predominately from the Russian point of view, otherwise it would just be called The Tragic First Ten Days Of World War II On The Eastern Front. But since this book is about "Stalin's Folly" it is natural to assume this is about Russia.

This book is genuinely entertaining. It turns the historical information into a truly human drama. The figures are brought to life in a way that it easily identifiable. The book sometimes digresses from the matter at hand to individual stories, of heroism, despair, and suffering. I found this greatly entertaining and these individual stories of the common person acted as a kind of "intermission" a way to gather your thoughts and soak up the information.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in World WarII on the Eastern Front, or anyone genuinely interested in entertaining historical drama.

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A good but not flawless account of those first ten days

Pleshakov has written a very detailed and lively account of those tragic first ten days, and the events leading up to them. His style is easy to enjoy, while his knowledge of the topic is extensive.

I only have two complaints:

(1) I think the endnotes should have been flagged by numbers so that it would have been easier to follow them.

(2) His theory that Stalin wanted to attack Germany by early July 1941 is not widely accepted, and there is no hard evidence whatsoever supporting it. It is just one possible explanation of Stalin's actions (or the lack of them) before Barbarossa, and (in my point of view) not even the most likely. Still Pleshakov regards it to be fact, and although he admits the lack of evidence, some readers may believe that what they're reading is the only (or at least by far the most likely) explanation of the known facts. Well, it is not.

Still, I recommend this book for anyone who's interested in the history (and the Soviet side) of the German Eastern Front.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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